The paper seeks to further the understanding of the potential of organisational theatre as an
intervention in organisational development and change programs. It employs the concept of
polyphony to support an analysis of the character and impact of organisational theatre
processes. The findings of this paper rest on a longitudinal single-case study, which followed
an organisational theatre process from its early development until follow-up stages at an
innovative health care project over eighteen months. The analysis suggests that, while
organisational theatre is able to provide multivocal and diverse debates and interpretations,
the outcomes and effects of organisational theatre for individual participants largely depend
on their perceived power status within the organisation.

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Co-­‐creation
as
a
concept
has
won
terrain
over
the
past
10
years
(Bhalla,
2010;
Ramaswamy
and
Goulliart,
2010;
Ramaswamy,
2011).
In
practice
as
well
as
in
literature,
co-­‐creation
is
climbing
the
agenda
in
relation
to
contemporary
opportunities
and
challenges
within
management,
organization
design,
and
change
initiatives.
Thus,
there
has
been
a
vast
growth
in
application
and
conceptual
development
of
the
concept
of
co-­‐creation.
However,
there
is
very
little
research-­‐based
literature
on
how
the
field
of
co-­‐creation
has
developed,
and
of
how
the
concept
is
being
established,
and
on
the
future
frontiers
of
the
concept
of
co-­‐creation.
This
paper
aims
to
build
an
overview
of
the
literature
on
co-­‐creation
to
explore
what
the
existing
literature
relate
to
and
indeed
to
pinpoint
if
any
patterns
or
streams
can
be
identified.
The
paper
illustrates
how
the
use
of
the
concept
of
co-­‐creation
suggests
a
necessity
for
focusing
further
on
specific
co-­‐creation
related
issues
and
challenges
of
significance
to
business
and
society.
Thus,
the
paper
highlights
new
co-­‐creation
related
issues,
challenges,
and
frontiers
in
practice
and
research
rather
than
giving
answers
or
solutions
to
existing
problems.

Co-creation has emerged today as a concept which thinkers across otherwise largely
opposed traditions have come to embrace. This dissertation substantiates how the
concept of co-creation, from proponents of Strategic Management Thought to
thinkers coming out of Autonomist Marxism and Critical Management Studies,
appears as designating either: (1) a new win-win mode of value creation where
businesses co-create value with various sorts of outsiders; (2) a new social,
commons-based value creation autonomous from business interests; or (3) a mode
of value creation intimately intertwined with new modes of management capable of
harnessing and exploiting productive capacities outside established organizations.
Behind these contemporary differences, the dissertation discloses a more
encompassing history. Through this, the emergence of a widely shared co-creation
vocabulary is brought forth. While this vocabulary is used persistently to express a
whole new mode of value creation, in whatever form, the dissertation argues that
the co-creation vocabulary actually undermines the very possibility of speaking
about value creation in a consistent manner.
At the same time, however, it is not a vocabulary which can just be dispensed
with, since its emergence is intimately intertwined with an accelerated emphatic
injunction; an injunction advanced by a reformulated managementality that
throughout the twentieth century has tempted management ‘to go outside’.
Accounting for this history, the dissertation claims that a complex experience has
been born, an experience of the outside. Through this experience, the outside has
emerged not merely as a source of value creation and an object of management; it
has also emerged as an obligation that has to be met, an obligation which is
forcefully expressed today through the co-creation vocabulary.
In order to inquire into contemporary accounts of co-creation, as well as the
historical trajectories through which this phenomenon has come to emerge, the
dissertation develops what is designated as the historical problematization analysis,
inspired by and reconstructed from the very late work of Michel Foucault. By
utilizing this mode of analysis, it becomes possible to bring together otherwise
separate accounts of co-creation on the same level of analysis, to inquire into
central historical conditions of possibility through which the phenomenon of cocreation
has come to emerge and to take stock of what difference the arrival of cocreation
introduces in relation to yesterday.

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A response to Marianne de Laet’s “Anthropology as social epistemology”

Ratner, Helene(, 2013)

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Resume:

As her title indicates, Marianne de Laet suggests that social epistemology could be
thought of as anthropology, in terms of how this mode of knowing has helped flesh out
the social dimensions of scientific knowledge. She does so firstly, by accounting for how
anthropological methods and concepts have contributed to science and technology studies
(STS) by providing an alternative to “believing the natives” i.e., scientists, hence
challenging positivist and objectivist accounts of science. She then specifies selected
analytical insights of anthropology. The concepts ‘culture’ and ‘practice’, she argues,
enable us to learn how “knowledge is social in an epistemic sense” (2012, 421). She
concludes her argument by questioning the distinction between epistemology and
ontology, maintaining that anthropology is social epistemology.
De Laet touches several key debates in the history of STS and much of her commentary
on the sociality of knowledge is difficult to disagree with. There are however, also some
elements in her argument with which I wish to engage critically. These include the
relationship between anthropology and STS and the relationship between the concepts of
culture and ontology. I will do so by drawing my inspiration from a contemporary a
debate across STS and anthropology that — like de Laet — regards entanglements of
epistemology and ontology, practice, and materiality. This project is also known as post-
ANT and empirical philosophy in STS (Mol 2002; Gad and Bruun Jensen 2010, 55-80;
Law and Hassard 1999) and lateral, multi-natural and ontological engagements in
anthropology (Maurer 2005; Riles 2000; Strathern 2004 [1991]; Carrithers et al. 2010,
152-200; Viveiros de Castro 2004, 463-484). De Laet mentions some of the same sources.
I will focus my commentary on these debates’ implications for the concept of culture and
“our terminological tinkering” (2012, 420). My aim is to provide a different account of
what anthropology has to offer STS and, as a consequence, to keep some interesting
tensions open between the conceptual and the empirical, between “us” and “them”, which
I believe de Laet resolves too quickly.

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This paper makes a contribution towards a more nuanced understanding of the ambiguous and contested relationship between neoliberalism and CSR (corporate social responsibility). It challenges stereotypical depictions of CSR as a neoliberal discourse and argues that there is a need for greater awareness of the varieties of liberalism at play in CSR. The paper is concerned with neoliberalism both in regard to the theory and the practice of CSR. Theoretically, it presents the Foucauldian understanding of neoliberalism and neoliberal governmentality as its primary means of identifying and analyzing processes of neoliberalization. On the practical side, it focuses on the neoliberalization of governmental approaches to CSR.

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How special groups organize for collaborative creativity in conditions of spatial variability and distance

O’Donnell, Shannon(Frederiksberg, 2013)

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Resume:

The enormous challenges and opportunities impacting the world community today increasingly require people to practice collaborative innovation effectively both in person and across geographic boundaries. Simultaneously, advances in technology such as social networking tools, digital 3-D representations, virtual worlds, and open source practices are inspiring generations of users to develop new kinds of adaptive collaborative networks and capabilities. But when people work across organizational and geographic boundaries, new challenges arise that make it difficult for groups to achieve the levels of excellence they are capable of achieving together in close proximity. Practitioners need help determining how best to perform collaborative creativity given unique and dynamic work conditions. Meanwhile, as new forms of creative group work emerge at an accelerating pace, researchers struggle to keep up with and develop nuanced understanding of the variations in collaborative processes we increasingly see performed.
With this PhD research, I aim to increase our understanding of a particular, specialized form of collaborative creativity called “ensembling.” I investigate this phenomenon by studying it in diverse—including “stretched”—conditions. By stretched, I mean that, literally, groups are stretched apart in space as membership size and spatial distance between members increase and work configurations vary. The groups I study are those both capable of achieving and driven to achieve a peak-performance state of ensemble, and do so via the enactment of an interdependent set of methods that call ensemble into being, a process I call ensembling. In their ideal form, these work methods support the emergence of ensemble and result in the creation of aesthetically coherent and novel outcomes that are particularly responsive to the contexts in which they are made.
To investigate the phenomenon of ensemble, I first develop a construct of ensemble based on informant descriptions, and use theory and data to develop a detailed description of how ensembling is performed in natural conditions (i.e., in close physical proximity). Then I look at an extreme example in which a set of expert groups’ ability to ensemble was put under stress by an unprecedented work task. In 2009, multiple string quartets (many considered world class) organized to perform a new musical composition. The composition challenged four quartets at a time to perform as an integrated ensemble while sitting apart, in various configurations, and at spatial distances of up to 70 feet. To help them address the difficulties produced by increased membership and distance, the musicians integrated a simple coordinating technology into their process.
To learn how participants made ensemble possible given these new conditions, I engaged multiple qualitative methods for generating data and multiple perspectives for interpretation. I first considered their process as an iterative approach to exploring strategies for addressing constraints, in order to show how the methods of ensembling interacted with conditions of increased group size, increased spatial distance and configurational variability, and to elicit their evolving beliefs about what methods made ensemble more likely to occur given these conditions. Then I performed an alternative interpretation, disrupting this logic and exploring the ways in which participants used methods of ensembling—particularly openness to uncertainty and reconceiving—to create unanticipated potentialities for ensemble to emerge despite constraints. I show how they worked with a coordinating technology called a “click-track” in important new ways that went beyond “merely” achieving synchronous coordination to increasing their autonomy, relatedness, and ability to demonstrate artistic virtuosity, enabling them to engage equally in leadership and participation and to play. Finally, performing a comparative analysis across sub-units of the case, including examples of breakdown in the process, I generated additional insights into what conditions, beliefs, methods and behaviors enable or inhibit processes of ensembling.
Integrating learning from analysis and interpretation, I propose a new range of conditions in which ensembling is possible, and a revised and expanded description of the methods by which groups ensemble. Conditions can expand to include larger groups with limited-tenure consisting of enduring-tenure sub-groups, multiple task interdependencies at group and sub-group levels, balanced tenure at sub-group level, a balance between proximity and distance, opportunities to work with and without technological mediation, and self-determined configuration variability. I show that the emergence of ensemble depends on, for instance, a shared purpose to ensemble, and methods such as a “struggle” phase, episodes of close physical proximity, collective leadership, “dueting” in different configurations, reconceiving constraints, living with the paradox of one-and-four, opening the process to uncertainty and to the emergence of consent, and subliminal technology engagement. Ultimately, these groups demonstrated an increasing ability to adapt to new conditions faster and more creatively, making new configurations possible, and suggesting ways in which ensemble might be performed in other kinds of group settings. I summarize findings in the form of a “framework of ensembling” that is meant to serve as a tool to further enrich our yet nascent understanding of this complex phenomenon and to aid in the exploration of ensembling in contexts outside the usual places we expect it to occur.

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Industrial and institutional revolution in the district of Aachen (Aix‐la‐Chapelle), 1800‐1860

Reckendrees, Alfred(Frederiksberg, 2012)

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Resume:

In the first half of the 19th century, the industrial district of Aachen was a small dynamic economic
region in the West of the Prussian Rhineland. It was a leading industrial region in terms
of production and a region in which modern economic institutions advanced modern industrial
organizations. The regional institutional arrangements were partly based on the French law:1
During the French Revolutionary Wars, the West of the Rhineland had been a part of France
with the region of Aachen (see maps 1 and 2) forming the Département de la Roer. After the
French defeat in 1814, the Rhineland was integrated as the Rhineprovince into the Prussian
State, but with very few exceptions the French legal system continued. The French code de
commerce rather than the Prussian civil law constructed the norms of business and commercial
activities2 and institutional arrangements that had emerged in the ‘French period’ continued
to influence regional economic development. Not only property rights and civil rights, also
other institutions of French origin like chambers of trade and commerce, commercial courts, or
collective institutions for the settlement of work related conflicts shaped economic behaviour.
3 New Prussian laws did not dramatically influence regional economic development; only
the Railroad Law (1838) and the Prussian Joint Stock Companies Law (Preußisches Aktiengesetz)
of 1843 had a certain impact. Just like the General German Trade Law (Allgemeines
deutsches Handelsgesetzbuch) of 1861, the Joint Stock Company Law was based on French
ideas and aimed at modernizing the Prussian economy. It perhaps helped developing the eastern
parts of Prussia towards a more capitalistic economy; for the region of Aachen it mainly
introduced more oversight from the Prussian State. The Prussian integration of the Rhineland
did, of course, also induce some economically relevant change; this regards e.g. the introduction
of the Prussian currency or the Prussian trade union. These aspects will be discussed later.

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A performative approach to studying processes of systemic innovation in the energy sector

Brenneche, Nicolaj Tofte(Frederiksberg, 2013)

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Resume:

The ongoing efforts to transform energy systems towards becoming environmentally sustainable provide a rich empirical source for cases of organizational creativity in the form of collective entrepreneurship, co-creation and collaborative innovation. In this paper, I will briefly introduce the challenge of organizing knowledge production in context of open-ended energy system transitions and argue, on the ground of a critical reading of established innovation management research, that a processual approach is needed in order to analyze how system transition processes are pursued through an entrepreneurial form of collective agency-in-progress through e.g. partnership arrangements. I will put particular emphasis on presenting a methodology for doing innovation process research performatively which I have developed during the course of my ph.d. research where I have participated in a European strategic partnership since 2009. Considering this partnership as a case of relational entrepreneurship within the organization of energy research, the methodological discussion puts focus on how to study this performatively – that is, how to not only theorize and study relational entrepreneurship as a practice of others, but to perform relational entrepreneurship through a research practice. The paper comprise an introduction and then a excerpt from my methodology chapter from my ph.d. thesis which I am close to finalizing.

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Today the European welfare states are strongly challenged and it is heavily debated how much
social security a society should provide and how much private insurance is possible. This article
goes back to the origins of the German welfare state. In the 1830s, industrialists from the district
of Aachen (Prussian Rhineprovince) suggested to implement collective labour rules regulating
working hours and wages. In the 1860s – 20 years before Bismarck – they proposed a mandatory
pension system with equal contributions of employers and employees; they suggested labour
conflict resolution by joint arbitration panels of employers and labour representatives. The proposals
did not gain support from the Prussian ministries arguing collective agreements would
violate freedom of contracting.
Entrepreneurs demanding social welfare and the Prussian state defending economic liberalism –
this challenges the perception of the Bismarckian welfare state as a means to reconcile labour
with the German state. Yet, in the early 19th century the district of Aachen was the most advanced
economic region in Prussia in regard with industrial employment and modern industrial
organisation. Producing quality goods for the world markets, the industrialists aimed at stabilizing
the social environment and reconciling labour with the capitalist society. Their motivation,
however, was not based on philanthropy; it was guided by economic aims and collective selfinterest.
Analysing ‘social policy’ as a capitalist aim, the paper puts the German welfare state in a
new perspective. By doing this it also wants to contribute to the discussion on the future of the
modern welfare states, because if the argument presented here holds it might have implications
for the possibility of privately solving social problems.

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The Social Productivity of Cartographic Crisis and Transitions in the Case of SEEIT

Brenneche, Nicolaj Tofte(Frederiksberg, 2013)

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Resume:

The long term transition to sustainable energy systems is already having an impact on
how energy research and innovation is being organized. With ambitious European and
national goals for energy system transitions, a new transition complexity challenges
established domains of expertise and other established actor domains. Thus, system
transition complexity opens up for a broad range of new relational problems which
transgress established definitions of expert domains and which areas of expertise
‘belong’ to energy research and which actors are relevant for energy research and
innovation. As an example hereof, the long term prospective of transformed energy
systems actualizes a need for combining expert domains and actors within energy
efficient buildings with expert domains and actors within the modeling, planning and
management of energy systems of various kinds. Many other examples could be listed
illustrating how energy research as a complex field of knowledge production and
innovation confronts a new, open transition complexity, which transforms the
landscapes of energy research.

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I never became interested in philosophy primordially or originally. There is no source event
or transformation that I can recall as being the defining moment. Stating ‘It began here!’
would be misleading… I am not even certain that I originally attained an interest, or even that
I still am interested in philosophy as a privileged object of investigation and investment ‐ an
aim in itself.
There are, however, moments and situations in my life where an interest in
philosophy has appeared or is necessarily forced upon me; these are times when philosophy
appears as a seemingly unavoidable and essential questioning of fundamentals,– as a ‘basic’
need. This being said, it can be annoying as well as cumbersome. Philosophy as a ‘basic’ need
makes itself felt as an estrangement that has always already taken place. It takes the form of a
“Schritt zurück” in which one pulls away from, problematizes and reconsiders the given,
including the given sense of community, its presuppositions and even the given self.
As now, where I find myself writing this at a seaside hotel and consider whether I would
prefer to stroll to the restaurant and chat with friends rather than continue taking pains to
scrutinize and reflect. Incidentally a well‐known ‘philosophical’ ‘solution’ or resort since
Hume. Concurrently, however, I sense that this latter choice may be lacking in philosophical
substance. In such situations, philosophy becomes equated with a tendency towards seclusion
– even with being secluded from myself.

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Despite the last years’ efforts to innovate public education in Denmark the Danish public school
has remained hesitant to change, and relations with the surrounding world have remained in their
early stages. Using Michel Callon’s concept of translation our study sheds light on the social
processes that form the conditions of managing innovation among professionals. It shows how
managing innovation in practice is part of a complex network of social interaction and evolves as a
constant ‘translation’ aiming at enrolling opposing actors, and positioning oneself in relation to the
professional identities and positions that innovation put at risk. The analytical contribution of our
paper is to add comprehension to innovation management in the public sector as a process of
positioning innovation in relation to a variety of human and non-human actors as well as
professional identities. Innovation is shown to challenge the professional identities of the teachers
and school leaders, as the teachers experience that innovation is not recognized in standardized
tests and thereby jeopardizes their professional position. Onwards the paper outlines three
management strategies that evolve in the social processes of the translation of innovation and the
different management positions that these strategies entail.

Following the workshop “Practicing Humanities and Social Sciences
in Management Education” at the University of St.Gallen in November
2012, the Copenhagen Business School was happy to host the follow-up
workshop “Humanities and Social Sciences in Management Education
– Writing, Researching, Teaching”. Yet again we were proud to welcome
international scholar adding great ideas and perspectives and initiating
fruitful discussion concerning the debates around management education.
This booklet contains the program, paper abstracts as well as articles
from the online journalism incubator Studentreporter.org and the
online Grasp-Magazine, summarizing various aspects of the workshop.
We would like to thank all scholars and participants for their great
contributions as well as a the Haniel Foundation for making the events
possible.
For further information about the workshops, projects and ongoing
discussions please visit our online-platform: www.practical-reasoning.eu.

Do user populations differ systematically in
the way they express and rate sentiment?
We use large collections of Danish and U.S.
film reviews to investigate this question,
and we find evidence of important systematic
differences: first, positive ratings are
far more common in the U.S. data than
in the Danish data. Second, highly positive
terms occur far more frequently in the
U.S. data. Finally, Danish reviewers tend
to under-rate their own positive reviews
compared to U.S. reviewers. This has potentially
far-reaching implications for the
interpretation of user ratings, the use of
which has exploded in recent years.